It’s hard to think anyone could take Kipling as a simple imperialist if they had read Kim, with its vivid pictures of India’s mixed and teeming peoples. Or if they had read Stalky & Co, in which a jingoistic tub-thumper is utterly repudiated, in embarrassment and revulsion, by the boarding-school children of the soldiers actually serving in India.

The key to Kipling is that he was not British. Britain was a mystery to him. When he bought a car in 1904, his chief aim was “the...